Editorial: FoodNet needs community's support

Two things that should never happen in the same month happened this month.

One happened in far-away Washington - which seems to be growing farther away every week-when the House of Representatives voted to slash billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The program is better known as SNAP and was known even better as food stamps in the days before electronic benefit transfer cards.

The other event happened here in Lafayette. The Greater Acadiana Food Bank, or FoodNet, announced that the supply of food for distribution to the needy has dwindled so much that the bank has had to dip into its operating money to buy food.

We can't speak for the reasoning employed by those who voted to take a knife to an important piece of the social safety net. But the plight of FoodNet makes a strong argument that we should remember our neighbors in need and step up with donations of nonperishable food and money to buy items not easily obtained as gifts.

The link between these two occurrences is the slow and halting recovery our economy has experienced over the last five years.

The most conservative members of the Republican majority have argued that, in a recovering economy, SNAP enrollment and costs shouldn't be rising as steeply as they have been. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the number of SNAP recipients has risen from 40 million in fiscal 2010 to 47 million this year. Between 2010 and last year, the cost rose from $56 billion to $74 billion.

In Louisiana, the number of SNAP enrollees rose from 901,000 in June 2012 to 917,000 in May 2013, again according to the USDA. And Louisiana is one of the states that is supposed to have weathered the Great Recession better than the rest of the country.

The bill passed by the House - and considered a poor bet to pass in the Senate - requires job training for recipients 18 to 50 without minor children and imposes a three-month limit on their benefits.

The concern on the part of conservative supporters of the cuts is that requirements have become too loose and that fraud is running rampant. Those are legitimate worries.

But the reality of our time is that unemployment remains stubbornly high, and many of those who are jobless continue to face long periods without work. They may find themselves exceeding the time allotted for their benefits. Or they may find themselves suddenly out of work after living paycheck to paycheck and wondering what to feed the kids until the SNAP benefits, an average of about $275 per family per month, kick in.

That means organizations like FoodNet must rely on the generosity of their communities to do their jobs. In Lafayette, the food bank distributes goods to 29,000 people. Executive Director Lemel Jones told us recently that FoodNet usually experiences a slump in donations through the summer, and this summer's decrease was especially severe.